My father had his own ideas about God and spirituality, and he kept searching obsessively for a path of faith that could provide answers to his unrest and tormented soul.

My mother was raised Catholic and had been observant for years after marrying. She told me the void almost talked to her in an assuaging voice.“a few seconds and all will be over.” The crude and painful image of my father getting remarried, her children raised by a stepmother who didn’t care about them prevented her from taking her own life. She had stepped back from the balcony barrier at the last minute.

She tried a few times, as she once admitted amid tears. She managed to keep everything to herself for years and then decided to release it all on me before exploding or committing suicide. In the fifties, that was no meager accomplishment for a young woman. She knew it wasn’t right to open up the way she did with her son, but she couldn’t do without: she had no family members close by, having moved hundreds of miles away from home to follow her work aspirations. She felt guilty she had no one else to talk about her pains but me. I discovered the anguish and the sadness of my mother only later when, still young, I became her confidante. He felt superior due to her humble origins. By the time my parents got married, the business only allowed an average life, just above struggling.įather must have cultivated an inner frustration, and made sure his wife was there to pay the price, too. My father’s family’s small enterprise allowed my grandparents to live a wealthy life.and they dilapidated a fortune. For lack of ambition, or just laziness, he resolved to work at the family business. She regretted that decision all her life, putting the blame on a husband she discovered only weeks after they got married was not Prince Charming.įather had squandered a good education. She stopped dreaming about returning to a job she truly loved when I was born three years later.

She once had a stable nursing position, which she quit under pressure from both my father and his family when their first child, my brother, was born. Mother was raised in a working-class family in the heart of Italy. Superfluous expenses didn’t have a place in our single-income budget. We lacked nothing essential, but what we had was not always of the best quality, and we couldn’t afford the latest and greatest. My family was no different from other middle-class families of that period. We lived in an apartment on the top floor of a seven-story building.

Daimones by Massimo Marino